


All just folk now.

by Hope



Category: Firefly, Serenity (2005)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-10-02
Updated: 2005-10-02
Packaged: 2017-10-03 10:37:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hope/pseuds/Hope
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Crew, post-Serenity.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All just folk now.

**Inara**

She knows that they wouldn't have accepted her as a tutor at the Training House if she hadn't had such a thorough, complete understanding of her own training. She doesn't understand, though, how it became so easy for her to lie to herself.

Simply _knowing_ it doesn't aid understanding, something that she thinks endless frustrations with Mal would have taught her by now.

She knows she left the trunk with Serenity. She knows the contents of that trunk were not incidental, and knows that the thought that Mal might or might not search through the trunk was irrelevant.

Her somewhat painful extraction from the Training House ought to have left her with nothing except the clothes on her back, but she had the trunk. Within it a few dresses, without exception less elaborate, less restrictive than the ones she usually wore at the Training House, or when entertaining. A few dresses, items of jewelry, and her bow.

Things that she needs to survive aboard Serenity. She wonders if she was lying to herself when she didn't take them with her; or if the greatest truth of all lies in the fact that she left them. She's not sure. Mal thinks that's a good answer, and she realises that that's enough.

 

**Zoë**

It hurt, but it hurt more to have someone else's hands on her. The bandage Simon had sprayed on had filled the wound like cold cotton, muffling the pain, buffering the pull and stretch when she tried to move. When they pull it out again later the old burn comes back, sending rivulets of icy pain into the skin around it. She wants them to keep flowing, wrap around her, band her body tight and numb. The hands are on her still, and then she's under.

When she opens her eyes again, the Captain's there, in the cot not two yards from her, his face all bruised and bloodied still, vessels burst under the skin though they'd cleaned the surface of it. He's asleep, and at the sight of him loose-limbed and still something breaks inside her. The shards of it cut into already-bloody tenderness, and she finds she can't breathe, and that helps. Zoë wakes up, and hopes that Mal doesn't.

 

**Simon**

The fact that River doesn't need the constant dedication of all his resources makes it a lot easier for Simon's introspection to flow right back in. Which turns out to be the kind of dichotomy that makes his skin itch on the inside, because he finds himself longing for that mindless devotion over the thoughts that arise otherwise.

Is he happy now? The qualifier that's been the least important in his life, such as it was, for so long; and the overwhelming feelings of being lost that _don't make sense_ after the cessation of being so long away from home, uncertain, on the run.

Serenity's his home, but he thinks maybe he's realised that too late; the Serenity that became his home is the Serenity he can never go back to, now. Waking up in the Alliance med facility with a numbness below his ribcage and River sitting next to him and smiling; the sense of vertigo that tipped precariously from that moment and hasn't really stopped falling since. The automatic desire once he and the rest of the crew were discharged to examine another's handiwork; peer at the stitches on Mal's belly, carefully pull back the dressing on Jayne's shoulder, assess the reasons for Zoë's tentative gait with the gentle press of his hands.

It's not his place to touch them, now. And he doesn't know how to touch her. It was easy to take comfort from River when the strength in the bloodied grip she was clinging to the cliff of sanity with seemed to rely on his hands on her skin, his fingers in her hair. That River was the simplest he'd known, simpler even than the fourteen-year-old sister who could run intellectual circles around him and whose joy at finally finding a place where she could belong was only exceeded by his own.

And his hands hesitate to come near her, surgeon's surety near all lost, not least of all somewhere in the places that make Kaylee smile, and gasp, and say things to him close and damp in his ear with the soft curl of her accent like sugar shavings on a cake. He's touched all the crew, intimately, at their most vulnerable, his hands in their flesh, but this throws him askew. He can't touch anything any more, but without the shield of River, everything touches him.

 

**Jayne**

Mal'd done right by those people. Not that they're ever gonna know it, what with being dead and all. For the first time, Jayne finds that don't matter.

 

**Kaylee**

She thinks: this is what she always wanted. She thinks: this is how I never knew it would be, when I wished for it. The feel of Simon's body under her hands different than she imagined it, warmer, more fluid. She's forgetting more and more how she'd pictured it, but she knows it wasn't like this.

She finds herself sitting on the low shelf in the engine room that her hammock used to hang over, finds a knot coil and rise in her throat as she looks at how the fire ravaged the engine. Looks at all the burned and broken bits, and then looks at all the shiny new Alliance-stamped parts she's yet to put in it, and then thinks of Shepherd Book. Thinks of the wound in his belly that near tore him apart, and how Simon was too late to put him back together again.

She finds herself thinking on it at moments that were incongruous at first, but have become standard. Digging her fingers into his bare shoulders and letting the anger that rises flood up over and drown the grief.

 

**Mal**

It ain't enough just to be still flying anymore. Thorns in his side turned out to be his ribs, and him left feeling like he's been ripped open. Stabbed, punched, shot at. T'ain't nothing that he don't usually risk in a day's work, though even as he thinks it he realises the truth in that -- nothing's changed except his understanding on it, that he's been playing at higher stakes than he realised all these years. His body pulls back together, though, as if completely independent of his thoughts. Which they are, he admits. Well, excepting maybe one of them.

He ain't used to being on the winning side.

 

**River**

She likes to hear him say it because his words reach out and caress the skin of Serenity even as his hands do, and really, re-forging the neural pathways were never necessary when all that was needed was to un-fog the new ones she'd formed. It had been a ruse to get rid of Early but things are clearer when she stops trying to explain them how she'd used to, when she stops looking for explanation and meaning and instead just allows them to come to her.

Serenity. Bloody. Loyal. Endurance. Calm. Different for all of them, but the same, the same base material shared and set as the primary element of the formula. They move in her, and she bears them all. Shelters them from the storm. River curls her knees to her chest and shivers a little, but not from cold. Mal's still talking, and his voice soothes, a gentle sensation over her skin.

**Author's Note:**

> http://hopeful-fiction.livejournal.com/35478.html


End file.
